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Redacted settlement gives hint that estate will get domain as part of the settlement.

The Estate of Prince Rogers Nelson has settled a legal battle with Domain Capital over ownership of the Prince.com domain name.

The estate sued Domain Capital saying that it was cybersquatting by owning Prince.com. Domain Capital countersued for reverse domain name hijacking and requested that the Prince trademark be canceled.

On June 11, the estate filed a planned settlement agreement in the probate court in Carver County, Minnesota. It’s heavily redacted and does not publicly display terms of the agreement. However, it mentions that there’s an escrow agreement involved. This suggests that the likely outcome is Domain Capital will transfer the domain to the estate and drop its counterclaims in return for a cash settlement.

Domain name financing company Domain Capital has responded (pdf) to a cybersquatting lawsuit brought by the Estate of Prince Rogers Nelson. That’s the musician Prince, who later changed his stage name to a symbol.

The estate sued Domain Capital over its ownership of the Prince.com domain name, claiming it was cybersquatting.

Domain Capital loaned money to the previous owner of Prince.com. That owner defaulted and Domain Capital took over the name.

Of course, it’s silly for any one entity to claim exclusive rights to the dictionary word “Prince”, and Domain Capital calls out the estate in its response. The financing company is asking for the estate’s trademark for Prince to be canceled and is also asking for penalties under reverse domain name hijacking.

.UK manager Nominet auctioned off many valuable one letter domains in 2011 and a Domain Capital Client bought H.co.uk in the auction for £16,000. The buyer later defaulted and Domain Capital took over the domain.

The cybersquatting complaint was filed by a UK company called H Limited. The company seems to believe it is the only company in the UK that could legitimately use the domain.

This runs contrary to what the Complainant stated in correspondence with the Respondent in 2015, when the Complainant’s representative proposed splitting the .CO.UK and .UK domain names among different purchasers, stating, “I can imagine a number of individuals to whom ‘H.UK’ would have the numerical value you describe”.

Attorney John Berryhill, who represented Domain Capital, noted that the Complainant’s imagination has become much more limited in the intervening several years.

(The Complainant replied to this assertion with an explanation I don’t really understand.)

The Nominet panelist noted:

[T]he Complainant cannot claim all-encompassing rights in the letter H on the basis of the evidence put forth (and indeed it is highly unlikely that any brand owner could ever claim exclusive rights in a single letter of the alphabet, even a huge conglomerate), and the Respondent certainly does have a reasonable justification for having registered the Domain Names, namely resale.

and

Trading in domain names can be lawful, and indeed there is a thriving domain name aftermarket. What is prohibited is attempting to profit from another’s goodwill and reputation in a name and, as explained above, the shorter that name, the more difficult it is to convincingly evidence abuse. In the case at hand, the letter H could relate to just about anything, hence its value when used as a .CO.UK or a .UK domain name.

The company put seven domains names up as collateral for the deal: manufacturedhome.com, manufacturedhomes.com, manufacturedhouse.com, manufacturedhomes.net, modularhomes.com, traveltrailer.com, and toyhaulers.com.

Structured as a sale-leaseback agreement, SearchCore will pay back the loan plus interest over 36 months.

SearchCore has bought a number of domains on an owner financing basis. Running low on cash, these deals haven’t always turned out as originally planned.

For example, last year it bought rodeo.com and karate.com for a combined $500,000 on a payment plan. With monthly payments of $22,222 due beginning in June of this year, SearchCore and the seller agreed to suspend all payments for at least five months.

It also extended payments on its acquisition of Sports Asylum.

Some of the domains that are part of the Domain Capital loan were also bought on payment plans. A payment plan for ModularHomes.com was modified and extended. ToyHaulers.com and TravelTrailer.com were also purchased on payment plans.